"Selected Poems Geoffrey Grigson" by John Greening (ed) (Greenwich Exchange, 2017)

He launched "New Verse" and was a frequent anthologist. Greening writes that "Grigson's poetry has rapidly fallen into neglect since 1985 ... but at the time it was highly regarded. ... [His wife Jan Grigson's] subsequent fame as a cookery writer - not to mention that of their daughter, Sophie - seems to have outlived his own as a poet".

He was a plain speaker -

• "All good criticism of poems - all of it, there's no argument, all of it - is written by good poets", The Private Art, p.134
• "Most American poets are not poets in any sense yet known to the human race", The Private art, p.213

I can't see much in his early work. There are poems about famous writers. The poems about Nature often read like disguised poems about people he knew, or himself. No cityscapes. More than one poem are about an unexpected object (skull, fossil, etc) discovered in Nature. In "Ammonite, under Sun and Thyme" the persona isn't curious about the fossil's history, only that

It occupies space, is in    Time, I'm aware, Glad that it should,    Like myself, be here.

The rhymes, as in several other poems, lead to contortions and padding. "In a Dark Passage" refers to 2 dead brothers and his first wife (who died of TB). It ends with "stepping/ Slower up the kitchen-smelling stair -/ O floes of ice, you float downstream/ But do not disappear". In isolation each of these images could be moving. For me, they don't work well together. "Out of the sound of railways" and "The 'I'" caught my attention.

"A Painter of Our Day" includes

With 'strangle the swan' I sympathize: He would not paint a swan or a rose. I would not write them. He says don't disregard The single swan drawing a glittering circumflex Along your river avenue: look - Allons Voir si la rose? - No, but into Its packed centre.

which is interesting.

Several of the short poems - e.g. "Driving through dead elms", "Twists of the way" - could be shorter. Maybe the repetition is lyrical.

The Notes at the end are useful. I can see that I might have missed many allusions. Philip Hobsbaum thought that "The Children" might have been Grigson's finest piece, noting that it probably wasn't the sort of poetry Grigson wanted to write (rather Georgian/Hardyesque).